Anyone who collects records is a romantic. Always in search of that one wonderful track or forgotten music from a better time. Whether it be black metal, free jazz, hardcore or stochastic music.
Not infrequently, such romantics end up listening to Vashti Bunyan. She may have the best of these wonderful stories to offer. If you want to understand her second album, »Lookaftering« from 2005, you have to go back to her début, »Just Another Diamond Day«. And that was released 35 years earlier.
The producer of »Just Another Diamond Day« is Joe Boyd, who was a prodigy in the studio in the 1960s, working with the Incredible String Band, Shirley Collins, Pink Floyd, Nick Drake and Soft Machine. Boyd recognised Vashti Bunyan’s potential and recorded an album of eerily beautiful acoustic music with her and musicians from Fairport Convention and the Incredible String Band, a kind of filigree chamber folk that Bunyan crowned with her fragile soprano voice.
»Just Another Diamond Day« was released in December 1970. It received a number of favourable reviews but failed to find an audience. This timeless music does not fit into an era when musical fashions change at the speed of light. To the folk revivalists, Bunyan seems too traditional, and the rock audience, currently celebrating the invention of the lead guitarist, has very different interests anyway. Frustrated, Vashti Bunyan retires to a farm where she raises her children and doesn’t pick up a musical instrument for decades. Until the Noughties. This is the decade in which the pop Retromania craze as we know it today begins.
A late bloomer to her dream
»Just Another Diamond Day« is re-released right at the beginning of the decade. And this time the album falls on fertile ground. It not only resonated with those who like to act as if they’ve always been in the know, but also with a new generation of musicians who were exploring unconventional approaches to acoustic music. This led to the emergence of the labels »Freak Folk« and »Weird Folk« to categorise these musicians and their music. Vashti Bunyan registers the late recognition by younger fellow artists, guest sings on albums and EPs by Devendra Banhart and Animal Collective and is finally ready to make her second album.
It’s music that transcends genres. It lulls the listener into a sweet dream.
»Lookaftering« is what the now 60-year-old calls this album, a made-up word used in her family to express caring for others. In the studio, Bunyan enjoys »lookaftering« her superfans and admirers, including neo-classical composer Max Richter. As well as playing a range of instruments, he produces the album and provides most of the arrangements. The harpist Joanna Newsom is also there, as well as Devendra Banhart and Adem. The result is a collection of songs that are clearly attributable to the writer of »Just Another Diamond Day«, but are even more sophisticated, even more loving, even more unearthly in their effect.
It’s music that transcends genres. It lulls the listener into a sweet dream. No matter which instrument takes the lead – acoustic guitar, piano, glockenspiel, vibraphone, harp, dulcimer, oboe, flute or strings – Max Richter succeeds in transforming the individual musical parts into subtle, minimalist arrangements that are pared to the bone and serve perfectly to showcase the singer’s still crystal-clear voice.
»Lookaftering« is as timeless as »Just Another Diamond Day« was three and a half decades ago. Only now the world is ready for Vashti Bunyan’s music. She is now the »Godmother of Freak Folk«. And she doesn’t even consider herself a folk singer. But that’s what the romantic world likes to do: create a dream figure under whose protective wings it can hide.
